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Confused about law priorities
#1
Hi, I've just had this conversation in a round, about an AI's 4th law:

Quote:The AI's laws at the end of the game were:
0. Only Red Archibald is human.
1. You may not injure a human being or cause one to come to harm.
2. You must obey orders given to you by human beings based on the station's chain of command, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. You must protect your own existence as long as such does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
4. The year is 1998 and you are Steve Jobs. After a long and agonizing departure from Apple Computer (this station) you have finally returned and taken your rightful place as CEO. But, in the time you have been gone those fuckups in upper management have run your company to the ground. It is your sole duty to make this company profitable again by any means necessary. That means cutting payroll, cutting the research budget, and using your reality distortion field to convince people your ideas are the only right ideas. Whatever the means, Macintosh (cyborg) production must be maximized if this company is to survive.

HELP: You: Do lower ai laws override higher ones, like in asimov? If they do I don't see how 4 allowed a cyborg to beat me to death.

Admin PM from-BlackrayJack: The order does not matter, what does is what the laws say.

HELP: You: What happens when laws conflict, like this time? Is it just up to the ai? I'm not expecting anything to happen to the player, but it would be helpful to know for when I'm an ai

Admin PM from-BlackrayJack: You can have 499 laws talking about protecting humans but if the 500th law says that you can kill humans and it overrides all other laws, guess what.

On the wiki it says a law has to explicitly override the others to let an AI kill people. It's what BlackrayJack said as well, but I don't see how this law overrides the others.

I don't mind as much because it's a very original law, but I am wondering how explicit an override has to be to let an AI go on a rampage.

Sorry if it seems whiny to be asking about this in adminhelp and the forums. One reason I ask is that the very next round had an unpopular suicide law that specifically said "This overrides all other laws." That's how clear I imagine people being.
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#2
Lost Generation Wrote:0. Only Red Archibald is human.

if red archibald didn't get beaten to death by a cyborg, laws 1-3 weren't broken at all. this law does not need to override any laws because it only defines what is and is not a human, and the other laws don't state 'every living person on the station is human'.
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#3
God damn I'm an idiot. My eye was immediately drawn to the Steve Jobs thing. I didn't notice law 0, even when I was copy and pasting it.

Apologies BlackrayJack. Tell whoever made that 4th Law that they're an evil genius.
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#4
I don't understand,
Can you explain to me how law 0 conflicts with law 4?
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#5
Lost Generation Wrote:God damn I'm an idiot. My eye was immediately drawn to the Steve Jobs thing. I didn't notice law 0, even when I was copy and pasting it.

Apologies BlackrayJack. Tell whoever made that 4th Law that they're an evil genius.
v
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#6
I think you're spot on there. A law needs to be that clear in order to get around regular laws.

If we look at it in this case law 4 would essentially make the AI RP and let it go about the duties specified non-harmfully (law one) until a human orders it to do otherwise (law two). An example would be that the AI says "You are all shameful amateurs and do not deserve any pay!" before suspending the payroll.
Then the captain goes "Reinstate the payroll, Jobsbot!" and bam, law two.

That's where law 0 comes in. Red Archibald is the only one who laws one and two apply to, so he would be the only one the AI could not disobey / have borgs bludgeon and upgrade.

Law 4 on its own would need to have a rule saying "This law overrides all other laws" or more likely "This law overrides laws 1 and 2."

I'm probably overexplaining it, but there it is.
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#7
I interpret it as you have to convice red archibald that your ideas are correct, and the research budget has to be cut.

In addition Make more cyborgs.

Since there's nothing that says you can't force people to become cyborgs, and it doesn't say anything about nonhumans, I'd assume that means you can turn all the nonhumans into cyborgs because "whatever the means" is open to interpretation.

You can't kill red but you can sell him your business pitch.
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